ON THE COVER: Granite crags of the southern Sinai mountain called Jebel Musa tower over St. Catherine’s Monastery. Built in the Byzantine period, when monks erected scores of monasteries in the Sinai commemorating Biblical events associated with the Exodus, St. Catherine’s marks the site where, according to tradition, God spoke to Moses from the burning bush. What can we believe today about the sites traditionally assigned to the events of the Exodus? Three articles in this issue address this question from vastly different viewpoints. Aviram Perevolotsky and Israel Finkelstein relate ecology to these traditional identifications (
“The Southern Sinai Exodus Route in Ecological Perspective”), while Emmanuel Anati gives his archaeological evidence, including thousands of rock drawings, for a new candidate for Mt. Sinai far north of Jebel Musa (
“Has Mt. Sinai Been Found?”), and William H. Stiebing, Jr. questions Anati’s radical redating of the Exodus (
“Should the Exodus and the Israelite Settlement Be Redated?”).